Appendix A: External providers

ComScore

ComScore is a US online analytics company providing audience data to marketers, businesses and publishers. ComScore’s methodology relies on their Unified Digital Measurement (UDM) method which, similarly to Nielsen’s hybrid methodology, combines both panel and census-based measurement approaches. According to the company, this methodology allows it to calculate audience reach without being affected by cookie deletion and cookie blocking/rejection, a common issue for solely site-centric measurement techniques.

The foundation of comScore’s platform is data collected from panel of 2 million worldwide internet users, half of whom are in the U.S., who opt in to sharing their Internet usage patterns, online and certain offline buying behaviour and other activities. ComScore reports on 43 individual countries. It also has site-centric measurement, where publishers can apply tags to their page, allowing ComScore to register traffic directly. The two data streams are then triangulated to produce an estimate.

UKOM

UKOM is the industry standard online measurement system. Like BARB for TV or NRS for national newspapers, UKOM will allow the placement of advertising across the whole medium to achieve clear reach and frequency objectives. They have partnered with ComScore to provide multi-platform audience measurement.

ABC

ABC (the Audit Bureau of Circulations) was founded by the ISBA (Society of British Advertisers) to provide an independent verification of data figures to improve buying and selling of advertising space within UK national newspapers. Now digital is one of their main activities.

One of their main roles is offering an expertise as verifiers of data across a wide range of media channels including print, online and events and they look to include new platforms as they emerge. They use a census-based approach which means counting every interaction rather than using a survey sample. This allows them to provide granular detail across channels to showcase performance and support the media buying process which is all the more important in an increasingly fragmented world

Chartbeat

Chartbeat is a US-based real-time analytics service which provides an interface for viewing what users on your site are doing right now, as well as providing historical context. The entire service is built on top of APIs which can be used to access and repurpose the data collected.

Unlike traditional analytics that are focused on understanding typical behaviours or patterns over the same content, or focused on checking in with the users when they load the page or click on something to give faster information, they are focused on unusual behaviour happening across the social web and how that affects constantly changing content. They do not rely only on traffic or page views but check in constantly with the site’s users to see where they are and what they are doing

NRS Padd

NRS Padd is a fusion of NRS Print and comScore digital data to create a single database for planning across print and digital platforms of NRS publisher brands.

The provide estimates of monthly, weekly and daily reach to help users make like-for-like comparisons, These are not new data but simply the pre-coded sum of the relevant reading recency codes. Monthly, weekly and daily pageview data are also available for websites, and in addition, average dwell time data, which can be used in conjunction with the Time Spent Reading data for print.

Reach and frequency: they have designed models for mixed-media schedule analysis, which show the total net reach of combined print and website schedules. For print they measure the number of insertions, and for websites the pageviews, as a number or as a percentage of the total available monthly pageviews

iJento

iJento is a US technology company that helps data driven organizations integrate and analyse their customer information across multiple channels and devices. They enable their customers to get direct access to their visitor data and gain sophisticated insights into customer behaviour, interests and intent at the individual level.

ForeSee

ForeSee is a US customer experience analytics company that helps obtaining insights in satisfying customers. They measure satisfaction and deliver powerful insights on where to prioritize improvements for maximum impact. They apply their technology across channels and customer touch points, including websites, call centres, mobile experiences and social media interactions.

Omniture

Omniture is a US online marketing and web analytics company, bought in 2009 by Adobe Systems. It enables clients to manage and enhance business initiatives. They provide advanced web analytics and segmentation (SiteCatalyst, Discover and Data warehouse), search marketing (Search Centre), optimization (Advanced testing and Targeting – Offermatica and TouchClarity), and the marketing integration platform (Genesis)

Outbrain

Outbrain is a US content discovery platform providing publishers a service for recommended links to increase traffic and generate revenue. It also works with brand and agencies to offer a way to distribute content alongside publisher’s own editorial recommendations. They offer two tools, Outbrain

Engagement, which helps generating a more engaged, satisfied audience while increasing long-term monetization, and Outbrain Amplify, which helps connecting your content with highly engaged audiences and customers across the web.

Hitwise

Hitwise is a service provided by Experian, a global information services firm. It claims to have the world’s largest sample of online consumer behaviour, sourced from both Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and opt-in Internet panel providers (who give info about themselves such as age, gender and income). Hitwise’s sample consists of 10 million US internet users and 25 million globally in 10 markets. The company then analyses their clickstream data, or the digital trail of web pages they've visited.

Such clickstream data is useful to determine the linkage between websites and can be useful in analysing search trends. Hitstream does not, however, provide absolute numbers but rather represents audiences as a percentage of the online population and that is why it often used in combination with other services.

Other tools – including academic focussed tools

A range of tools, many of which are free and open source software (FOSS) are used in the academic and research context, and several of these may also be used by industry.

Academic-focussed tools such as MediaCloud (developed at Harvard and MIT) and NOAM (developed at Bristol University) provide researchers with an integrated system for the collection and analysis of online text based content. General purpose data analysis tools, such as the Python language, and open source statistical analysis tools such as R can be used stand-alone or with additional add-ins to carry out network and sentiment analysis. However more specialist tools are available. For example, free to download packages for the analysis and visualisation of network data include packages such as NodeXL, Pajek and Gephi as well as commercial software packages. Tools for sentiment analysis include both freely downloadable tools, in addition to commercial packages for researchers and marketers which integrate with social network platforms.